A native V-Ray version of alSurface focused on skin shading
Developed to extend the capabilities of Solid Angle’s Arnold renderer in VFX production pipelines, and later made open-source, alSurface is capable of recreating a wide range of real-world surfaces.

It’s particularly popular for skin shading – it supports subsurface scattering – which is the aspect Chaos Group has focused on in its own implementation.

According to the firm’s blog post, its version currently takes into account diffuse colour, two levels of specularity and SSS. Refraction and transparency are still absent, but “may be added at some later point”.

Availability
The V-Ray implementation of the alSurface shader is a free download from Chaos Group’s GitHub repo. It supports both V-Ray for 3ds Max and V-Ray for Maya running on Windows or Linux.